 I wanted to gain more confidence with my drawing and visualizing skills because visualizing in service design is super important but I'm not naturally somebody who is comfortable drawing. So I set up a 30-day challenge to draw something related to service design every single day. I put the challenge online and within three days 300 people decided to participate in this so that was quite interesting. In this quick video I want to share with you some of the biggest lessons that I learned of drawing taking six minutes every day to draw a service design concept. So if you don't know the background story on October 1st, Giovanni Rello, fellow service designer and I started a drawing challenge where we would post a concept related to service design every single day in a closed community and you have six minutes to draw the concept. Now fast forward, 30 days later the challenge is over. What I experienced around halfway through the challenge is that I started to get comfortable with my drawing style. So the best way I can compare this to is just like hearing your own voice on a recording for the first few times. It sounds really awkward and you have to get used to hearing your own voice on camera, on audio and I felt the same with my drawing style. So because when I was drawing I was looking at my pictures and I was thinking this looks crap, this looks childish, a lot of people are so much better at it but at some point I think it was around halfway. I became used to it, it was like okay, so this is sort of my visual voice and I became much more confident about sharing it and just drawing, not overthinking it and what also helped was that we just had six minutes to do each challenge. Now what also contributed to this is we had this closed community where people would share their drawings after they were done and you could look at the other contributions and see that most people aren't extremely good visual artists and that sort of brings down the expectation level you have for yourself. I think that's the other challenge with visualizing. You see all those magnificent drawings like the cool visual artists and you think I can never do that but that's not the point, the point is to bring a message across and when you see other people quite similar to you also visualizing and using, let's call them quite low fidelity visualizations then you sort of become much more comfortable. Okay, this level is just good enough and that was really compelling for me. I don't know how the other people experienced it but seeing sort of the detail in the visualization of others really helped me to get confident about my visualizing style. So that was the 30 day challenge. My next challenge is how could I continue drawing when I'm done? So the challenge is now over but I still don't feel that drawing is a habit that I have in all the aspects that I do. I don't make visual notes, I don't draw in my videos for instance and that is I think something that I could benefit much more. So that's the next thing I'm thinking about how to make this into a habit and what I think is that this challenge provided a really good excuse to just draw. You had an assignment, you had a challenge, you had an excuse to draw. In a lot of other cases you don't have that excuse and you just have to do it naturally. So I'll be thinking about what kind of excuse can I introduce in my own life so that I will start visualizing more. So that's sort of the wrap up of my experience with a 30 day drawing challenge. It was awesome to see all the contributions from the other participants. I want to thank Giovanni for also participating in this and helping me to set this up. If you think that this would be interesting to you or you know somebody who might be interested in this, we're going to do a second round of this challenge. It will probably be early 2021. If you want to get on the waiting list and be notified when the registration opens, head over to servicesdesignshow.com slash 30 day and I'll send you a notification once registration is open. So I'll be trying to draw more, I'll be trying to visualize more and I hope it does the same for you.